Monday, June 1, 2009

Poetry & Popular Culture Heroes: John Strachan

Just when Poetry & Popular Culture thought it knew every poetry superstar who walked down the red carpet of popular culture, along comes John Strachan, professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sunderland and author of Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period. Okay, so we knew that Strachan was out there writing. A few years ago, we had occasion to talk about the comparative tonsorial poetics of early 19th-century England and mid 20th-century America, discovering the "barberous" verse connections between P&PC fave Burma-Shave and the British, Romantic-Era, New York City-based barber, poet, and master of self-promotion J.R.D. Huggins. And not too long ago we learned of Strachan's fondness for the poetry of late 18th-century pugilism. So he was on the office radar.

But nothing could have prepared us for Advertising and Satirical Culture in which Strachan walks seemingly straight out of the Romantic Era with the poetry of shoe blacking in one hand and the verse of bear-fat hair oil in the other. Bringing advertising jingles, parodies, and elaborate mock epics together with poetry and puffs written by the age's more recognizable literary figures—Byron, Coleridge, Crabbe, Dickens, Lamb, Wordsworth, and others—Strachan reconstructs an entire sphere of literary activity created and sustained not just by resourceful and ingenious copy writers but by canonical ones as well. Along the way, he manages to argue that some of what literary critics have long identified as the defining characteristics of "Romantic" writing—a focus on the individual, creativity, genius, originality, etc.—are, in fact, also defining characteristics of the age's advertising poetry. Popular poetry, he reveals, didn't have a monopoly on the commercial. And literary poetry, in turn, didn't have a monopoly on genius.

To go about showing this, Strachan spends two chapters surveying the landscape of advertising poetry and the responses it elicited among the literati. Advertisers not only quoted literary poetry in their puffs, but they imitated it, parodied it, and wrote all sorts of verses of their own as well. In turn, literary writers not only parodied advertising poetry to critique the excesses of commercial culture, but they found in such puffery what Strachan calls a set of "formal models for satire aimed elsewhere." That is, they borrowed the familiar, catchy, poetic discourse of advertising—and the figure of the shameless ad man—to critique a wide range of targets. Take, for example, Thomas Moore's 1826 squib lampooning two Tory figures (Poet Laureate Robert Southey and the editor of The New Times) by comparing them to snake oil salesman Dr. Eady (who hawked a surefire cure for syphilis):

Though many great Doctors there be,There are three that all Doctors o'ertop,Doctor Eady, that famous M.D.,Doctor S-th-y, and dear Doctor Slop.The purger—the proser—the bard—All quacks in a different style;Doctor S-th-y writes books by the yard,Doctor Eady writes puffs by the mile!Doctor Slop, in no merit outdoneBy his scribbling or physicking brother,Can dose us with stuff like the one,Ay, and doze us with stuff like the other.

If Chapters 1 & 2 paint a picture of literary England in which advertising drove the writing of literature and literature drove the writing of poetic ads, then the remaining chapters in Strachan's book focus on advertising campaigns for individual products—shoe blacking, the national lottery, hair oils, and tonsorial services—and the responses those campaigns elicited. These are totally fun, sometimes hilarious chapters about the minutia of Romantic-Era life, but they also open a number of windows onto the politics (and poetics) of everyday life inherent in the most unassuming of consumer goods. Who would've thought, for example, that the period's great crinicultural debate—whether to use vegetable-fat hair oil or bear-fat hair oil—came about because of an emergency wartime tax on hair powder levied by William Pitt the Younger? To protest the tax, Pitt's political opponents began wearing their hair unpowdered, which understandably necessitated a need for some sort of gel, cream, spray, or mousse to help manage out-of-control locks. Hence the emergence of the hair-oil industry (and the eventual dissolution of the hair powder business) accompanied by an entire sub-genre of related verse. Consider Thomas Spence's "An Address to Mr. Pitt Accompanied by a Crop of Human Hair" which, Strachan explains, "defiantly declares that he is proud to wear his hair unpowdered, that he will be no 'guinea pig' (as those who paid the guinea tax were dismissively labeled) and that he hopes Pitt will slit his throat while shaving":

O Heaven-born minister of state,This tail from off my swinish pate, Most humbly I present it;For since no powder may we wear,Determin'd I've cut off my hair, And to your honour sent it.

Know then vile Tory, I'm a Whig,And will not be a Guinea pig, To satisfy your craving;Oh! that your razor would but slipThree inches underneath your lip, When you yourself are shaving.

A deadly gash I hope 'twould be,To end your damn'd hypocrisy, And rid us of a P-t.A speedy peace I now pray for,To finish this unlucky war, Thus endeth my dull wit.

There's more where those stanzas come from, dear reader, so get your copy of Advertising and Satirical Culture today. Nine out of ten enthusiasts of poetry and popular culture recommend it.

About Me

Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War

"Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

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"Burma-Shave quatrains, newspaper columns, scrapbooks with thousands of stanzas held together by affection and paste, folksy, pseudonymous, nationally famous radio hosts and the fans who sent them an avalanche of homemade verse: these are just some of the materials taken seriously in Mike Chasar’s extraordinarily memorable, and likely influential, study of popular American verse, and of the popular culture that grew up around it, for most of the twentieth century. Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, to images, and to informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links Williams Carlos Williams’s innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the Hallmark card; he may change how you see some eminent writers’ work. Even more than that, however, Chasar should get twenty-first-century readers to sit up and notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry that they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode that Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/ HAS LOTS TO SAY/ IF YOU CAN READ IT/ CHASAR’S WAY. His book is an ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies; it’s also a surprise, and a delight." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

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"As Bob Dylan put it, 'We have our ideas about poets,' and we certainly have our ideas about poetry. Lately, those ideas have led to a national outcry in favor of bringing poetry back into American public life. But in Everyday Reading, Mike Chasarshows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important—really, a necessary—book for anyone interested in modern poetics, in the history of reading, in the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance." — Virginia Jackson, University of California Irvine, author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

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"This breakthrough study convincingly shows that American poetry in the opening decades of the twentieth century, far from being a largely elitist product that appealed to a limited audience, circulated among a number of different readers to a remarkable degree and left its traces in surprising areas." — Edward Brunner, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Cold War Poetry

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"The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness—this is what Mike Chasar ... has shown in his book Everyday Reading" — Marina Zagidullina, New Literary Observer

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"[T]he originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading." — Lisa Steinman, The Journal of American History

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"[The] tension between the poetic and the popular is the crux of Chasar's fun and thoughtful book. Chasar is a literary archaeologist. He excavates the poetry in Burma Shave ads, literary scrapbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, old time radio shows, and yes, even Hallmark cards. His close reading of [Paul] Engle's poem 'Easter' as well as the reproduction of the actual card is genius. His thesis is that early-twentieth-century market culture was saturated with poetry (as opposed to 'Poetry') that was participatory rather than exclusionary. This emotional interactivity with poetry, Chasar posits, set the stage for the bizarre matrix of media, commerce, and culture that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century." — Dean Rader, American Literature

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"Everyday Reading goes far in illustrating how poetry played a much larger role in most Americans' lives than it does today. Chasar paints a picture of a more various and ultimately dissident American public than most might have expected, a public for whom poetry was a crucial part of an overall strategy to counter the dominant political, economic, and social paradigms of their era. Written beautifully and researched meticulously, Everyday Reading will prove an important resource for political and cultural historians, literary scholars, and anyone else interested in how poetry transcends the page and becomes an active part of how we spend our days." — Daniel Kane, Journal of American Studies

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"Highly recommended." — Choice

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"Everyday Reading is sure to act as a touchstone for scholars interested in popular digital literature as well as the contemporary avant-garde....[It] concludes with a flourish: an anecdote about the author's grandmother's use of clipped poetry in wartime letters to her husband that evidences Chasar's arguments while remaining personal and poignant. It is a fitting moment for a book that is so innovative, important, and constantly successful" — David Levine, CollegeLiterature

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"Scrapbooking, which appears in other chapters following the first one, becomes the controlling metaphor for Chasar's study—and for reading habits today. With so many cultural products driven by individual tastes and various engines of a global economy, readers inevitably select and construct their own 'tradition,' which may have much or little to do with what they have been taught is important. Chasar's well-documented, thoughtful book offers the larger picture of this phenomenon, of which the battle for the best is only part of the story." — Rhonda Pettit, Reception

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"A brilliantly written book, startling the reader with his thorough research and analysis" — Sheila Erwin, Portland Book Review

Now Available from the University of Iowa Press

"[Poetry after Cultural Studies] should become an important part of debates about what poets do, what their poems are good for." — Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry